Paradox Of '50s Women

Americans tend to think of the 1950s as a rose-tinted decade in which the roles of men and women were clearly defined and everyone was happier for it. Women had their poodle skirts, their Good Housekeeping and their new refrigerators. What else was there?

But the women of that era were more conflicted about their roles as housewives than they let on at the time, and a number of them spoke with author Brett Harvey about those personal conflicts for her book The Fifties: A Women's Oral History. Harvey spoke with women now between ages 58 and 68 who matured in a decade when the only choice for women was marriage and family. Some strayed from the confining, conservative gender role forced on them after the end of World War II only to find that ''breaking the rules'' could carry harsh consequences such as back-alley abortions, job loss or jail. The realities of women's lives in the '50s often clashed with the manipulative messages from the culture. Harvey writes:

''One of the great paradoxes of the fifties is that even in the face of a powerful domestic revival, women continued to enter the work force in ever-increasing numbers. In the first five years of the decade, the number of working women shot up from 16 to 22 million.''

Women's earnings may not have been essential to the family's survival, but the money provided extras such as vacations, second cars and college tuition for children. And many women worked because they enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment and stimulation.

But the '50s was a cruel era, judging from the comments of the working women, mothers, nonmothers, white women, black women, intellectuals and suburbanites Harvey interviewed. Some of their stories are tragic, others heroic.

They tell of the overwhelming fear of pregnancy and the lack of birth control options or safe abortion. Adoption was often the only choice for the unwed pregnant woman of the '50s.

''These wonderful do-good social workers say, go on with your life, you'll forget,'' says one woman. ''Well, I have news for you, you don't forget. You don't have a baby and then forget. Today I would sooner have an abortion than give a child up for adoption. Not knowing where your child is, whether it's dead or alive . . . that's something no human being should have to go through.''

Other women tell Harvey about the suffocating boredom of suburban life and the loveless marriages made for the sake of stability. Perhaps most amazing are the stories of women who went to work or got through college despite overt hostility:

''On the first day of classes, the dean of architecture called us all into the auditorium,'' recalls one woman. ''There were three women in a class of at least a hundred. He said, 'I see we have three women here. We're not going to have them much longer.' ''

It was a confusing time even for women who did successfully pursue education and jobs. Harvey writes that some of the women she interviewed ultimately got tired of struggling and decided it was easier to conform to the narrow female role:

''In the fifties, most women saw only two roads ahead of them: one lonely, difficult, and uncertain; the other, comfortable, predictable, and smoothed by loving companionship.'' For every woman who did succeed in a profession, there were many whose determination faltered in the face of a husband's opposition or an institution's hostility. Many women simply couldn't see how to manage work and children and were unwilling to forgo the latter. One woman sums up the conflict: ''I was doing a lot of reading about metaphysics and one day while I was rinsing out dirty diapers in the toilet, I thought, these things are incompatible. So I stopped the reading - I couldn't stop the diapers.''

The fear of not fitting in was tremendous, and these women have the heart-rending stories to prove it. ''They had to make a choice men never have to make, between a family and meaningful work,'' Harvey writes.